Jeff Wall: Life in Pictures

White Cube presents a generously portioned survey of the trailblazing conceptual photographer, from his disquieting re-enactments of everyday life to his recent mannerist experiments

Jeff Wall, Listener, 2015. Installation view, Jeff Wall, Life in Pictures, White Cube Bermondsey, 22 November 2024 – 12 January 2025. © Jeff Wall. Photo © White Cube (Theo Christelis).

White Cube Bermondsey, London
22 November 2024 – 12 January 2025

by JOE LLOYD

In Jeff Wall’s Listener (2015), a topless man is kneeling in a Christ-like pose on a dusty patch of ground. There is sweat on his forehead, and dried grass on his trouser leg. He looks exhausted. His right hand gropes the ragged earth as if to stabilise himself after a tumble. At least six men stand around him, although we can see only fragments of their bodies. One is just a shoulder and a shadow. We see part of the stern face of another, who seems to glower menacingly towards the cameraman. His crossed arms might be a warning. A third man, almost all in the frame, might have shoved the kneeling man to the floor.

It could be a scene from a bleak contemporary western. It could also be a scene from life, a depiction of the one of the countless brutish and nasty acts that take place in the world, the sort of thing that is reported but seldom photographed, never mind printed at huge scale and hung on a gallery wall. Instead, Listener was staged. The men are actors. The clipped framing is deliberate rather than the result of a hasty shoot. The violent act did not happen – though similar acts undoubtedly have. Photography is a medium with an implicit truthiness. It is used to capture people, moments in time, the world. Yet the moments Wall chooses to depict are constructions. His practice queries the photographer’s claim to truthful reportage. After all, aren’t photographs always constructed?

Jeff Wall, Listener, 2015. Inkjet print, 167.3 x 240.3 x 6.5 cm (65 7/8 x 94 5/8 x 2 9/16 in). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Wall (b1946, Vancouver) is one of contemporary art’s great re-enactors. Some of his works recapture scenes he witnessed first-hand: Mimic (1982) incarnates a racist gesture Wall saw on a street. Others, such as the recent work Fallen Rider (2024), capture incidents Wall was told about. And many draw on a deep well of art and literature, although seldom in the most obvious way. His first breakthrough image, The Destroyed Room (1978), features a woman’s trashed bedroom. The composition parallels Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), in which the dying tyrant commands that his world possessions – including slaves – are immolated on his funeral pyre. But in Wall’s work, as in Listener, the violence is off-camera.

Except for The Destroyed Room, all these works feature in Life in Pictures, a career-spanning survey at the White Cube. Next year, it will make the unconventional leap from private gallery to institution by touring to the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon. It offers a chance to become reacquainted with a trailblazer whose presence has become easy to take for granted. After some early dabbling in photography, Wall trained as an art historian and taught throughout the 1970s, turning to create his characteristic works late in that decade. Struck by the majesty of old master painting and convinced that technology had made it impossible to paint like them, he sought a new medium for depicting modern life.

Jeff Wall, After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999-2001. Transparency in lightbox. 174 x 250.5 cm (68 1/2 x 98 5/8 in). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Wall found inspiration in the advertising billboards at bus stops, which blew up photographic images to huge dimensions. Much of his output would take the form of vast cibachrome photographs on wall-mounted light boxes, granting his work a sculptural quality. This was one of the ways in which he altered how photographs are exhibited and considered. Another was in artificially staging scenes, disconnecting photography from reality and moments in time. The photojournalist aspires to capture a split second; Wall’s images can take months to create. A hallucinatory vision entitled The Flooded Grave (1998-2000), which depicts a coral reef in an empty cemetery plot, took two years. After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999-2001) constructs the underground dwelling place of the literary character, for which Wall had to learn how to wire in order to connect its 1,369 light bulbs.

Jeff Wall, The Thinker, 1986. Transparency in lightbox. 239 x 216 cm (94 1/8 x 85 1/16 in). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Wall’s world is often a fallen one. Time and again he returns to the ugly, debased cityscapes of the post-industrial west. Mimic shows one such neighbourhood, with fraying edge lines and weeds growing out of the pavement. Rooms are often scruffy and tattered: even the grand reception room in Event (2021), site of an aggressive act of finger-wagging, has chipped and scratched wood. The Thinker (1986) takes a posture from Rodin’s sculpture and Albrecht Dürer’s proposal for a monument commemorating the end of the German peasants’ war of 1525, topped with a dejected peasant. It shows an aged worker sitting on logs and breeze-blocks, contemplating a scarred landscape. There is a sword in his back, one of several surreal touches that further disrupt the photographer’s claim to realism.

Jeff Wall, Boy Falls from Tree, 2010. Lightjet print, 226 x 305.3 cm (89 x 120 3/16 in). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Since the 1990s, he has used technology to collage elements from multiple shots, further distancing his work from photographic “reality”. He has also moved away from light-box works, and started working with more conventional prints, some in black and white. His subject matter has arguably become more quotidian. The Manet-referencing Tattoos and Shadows (2000) is simply a scene of three individuals in a suburban garden. Boy Falls from Tree (2010) captures a dramatic incident, but an everyday one. Some of Wall’s recent work features black-and-white gelatin prints, which enliven his play with light. The subject of A Woman With a Necklace (2021) holds up her jewellery so that it becomes illuminated with daylight. The absence of colour only makes the light shine brighter – something the holder herself might not realise.

Jeff Wall, Tattoos and Shadows. 2000. Transparency in lightbox, 214.9 x 274.3 x 30.2 cm (84 5/8 x 108 x 11 7/8 in). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Wall still plays tricks in his later works. He has entered something of a mannerist phase, with the artifice overwhelming his last semblances of realistic depiction. Some works feature different actors playing the same characters. I Giardini (2017) is a triptych depicting two characters in an Italian garden. It appears to present a narrative, but Wall gives us only the slightest of details: a stressed hand gesture, a speechless walk. Matters are complicated further by various doublings: one picture shows two versions of each character conversing, another sees them interact with simulacrums of themselves in different clothes. It feels pointed that the last image has the pair walking into a hedge labyrinth, a site of disorientation. They are reading something – is it a guide? Or are they practising their lines for a performance?

Jeff Wall, A Woman With a Necklace, 2021. Silver gelatin print, 163.6 x 227.6 x 6.9 cm (64 7/16 x 89 5/8 x 2 11/16 in). © Jeff Wall. Photo © White Cube (Theo Christelis).

Recovery (2017-18) is more bizarre still: a sole photographic image of a man sits surrounded by a naive Seurat-via-Matisse painting of a beach scene, looking not a little baffled. This is still a photograph – though hardly recognisable as one – while the painting itself also has a sheen of unreality, as if digitally generated. I have to admit to sharing the sitting figure’s confusion. A shrewder blurring between paint and photographer can be found in images where certain details look as if they could have been painted, such as the spiked gate in In Front of a Nightclub (2006) or the woman’s face and hands in Informant: An Occurrence Not Described in Chapter 6, Part 3 of Últimas Tardes con Teresa by Juan Marsé (2023). As well as probing the reality of their medium, Wall’s photographs challenge you to find the moments where reality looks unreal.